HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background. Before starting Lance, I worked in PR and marketing. Whether working in agencies supporting large multinational companies or helping to launch startups, I loved helping share their stories. I’ve always seen this particular job as being at the center of a lot of different people - and having to figure out how to translate a message and story between them. I think I was drawn to it, having grown up as a first-generation American and having to constantly navigate a mix of languages and cultures. A handful of years ago, I had the opportunity to dive into an even more intense context of blended languages and cultures. I started coaching startups in Tel Aviv, Israel, through a venture capital firm, Aleph VC, and at local accelerators. As I did this and started freelancing more, I stumbled upon all the challenges inherent in setting up and running your own business. That experience led me to found Lance with my co-founders. We’ve started to build the financial framework we found missing and often stops people from working more flexibly for themselves. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? Lance is the first financial guidance account for creators and flexible workers. Part business banking account and part robo-advisor, Lance can collect multiple, different incomes and accurately calculate and actively allocate toward: A personal salary Regular tax withholding Creating a business expense spending balance, and Savings. Lance can also automatically pay quarterly tax payments, populate custom Schedule C documents, and send a bi-monthly salary to users’ personal bank accounts. What is the origin story? My co-founders and I have all been freelancers at one point or another. Since meeting each other eight years ago in Tel Aviv - when I mentored them on their first startups - we started talking about the financial challenges around freelancing. We vented about how our accountants didn’t really understand what we were doing, and the tools out there weren’t really built for us either. We started talking to our freelancing friends to figure out if there was something already out there we were missing. We started building… And we launched an app that helped you see all your monies and options wherever they were. But then, in 2020, as we held webinars and happy hours, we realized that wasn’t exactly right. That focus on transparency and education was half the problem. What people needed wasn’t more learning and homework to do around their finances. They needed to just have whatever money they were making actually put in all the right places for them - and trust that that was done well. With Lance, freelancers no longer have to research the right way to organize their income, then set up the systems, and then maintain and update them regularly. Lance takes care of all those steps for each freelancer in a customized way as they grow. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? I love two things specifically about our team. The first is that 100% of our team has been a creator at some point. The resulting passion for building the very best framework for flexible work is unparalleled. The other value we share is endless curiosity. We’re constantly thinking about the best ways to build Lance, learn about and integrate financial growth mechanisms, and work as our customers’ best (financial) friends. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? My friends and I have an ongoing joke that at some point, I’ll have a bed & breakfast. I’ve always tried to create a home - across states and countries around the globe now - in which people from all walks of life can feel welcome and comfortable to relax fully. That always includes at least one or two delicious, homemade spreads. Cooking and baking is often my form of creativity that barely holds a candle to my parents as artists. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? Our core metrics measure how much our customers trust Lance to collect different income streams (across their multi-hyphenate pursuits) and put their money in all the right places as a business. We also track and are thrilled every time we hear about how much people love Lance for how simple it is to use and how they hadn’t ever thought about different things we do automatically! What’s most exciting about your traction to date? What’s most exciting to us about our traction right now is just how much people are trusting us to allocate their income in the ways we recommend. It means that we’re really solving for something people need and in which they see tremendous usefulness. I’d say that, personally, I’ve just really been awed as well by how many people have shown up (repeatedly!) for all our webinars and workshops and started creating a community around business finance curiosity. What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why? As expected from a startup founder, I’m most excited about what doesn’t exist right now and why. I’m excited about the promise of open banking and how much more control over their finances and financial choices people will have in the future. And, from what I see today, I’m then very mindful about how to make decision-making as easy and automated as possible to any individual’s needs. More than technologies, maybe, I’m curious about how we’ll continue to look at data and plug it into more thoughtful AI and recommendation engines. I think all of us will be inspired to be more creative and dive deeper into what people really need - and should be afforded - as they work more flexibly across their entire careers. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? Hacker Noon is this crazy, endless collection of discussions about all the things happening - and yet to come - at the forefront of different technologies. I love that you get the most direct - and longer form - opinions and experiences across these technologies. It’s where tech professionals and noobs come to really dig in. It’s incredibly creative and I’m just thrilled to be included in this community. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? I’d just reassure myself that my insatiable curiosity would lead to amazing places and opportunities. I had a lot I wanted to sink my teeth into at that age - and a tremendous amount of trepidation about all the things I didn’t know and wanted to learn. I’d just tell myself, “Work hard and stay curious. It’ll all make sense and come in due time.” What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? It was very interesting to learn that freelancers’ income was mainly unaffected during the pandemic, as most freelancers are hustlers: if the money isn’t coming from somewhere, they will find another path. It was really surprising to see just how quickly more flexible, multi-hyphenate workers bounced back from the pandemic panic. They’re so used to marketing, sourcing clients, and following new trends in their respective fields that not only did their incomes stay roughly the same in 2020, but they often did this while pivoting into entirely new fields and businesses. Talk about effective upskilling and making the most of a global crisis! Vote for Lance as the . startup of the year, New York City

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How can you optimize your user’s journeys to create more sales and leads right away? Many businesses struggle to figure out how new users learn about their brand. And then how to optimize each stage of the user’s interaction with their business so that more people buy or sign up for the company’s email list. Conversion paths are the critical factors that impact your conversion rates. Let’s take a look at what conversion paths are, why they matter, and how to optimize them. What is a conversion path? A conversion path outlines the steps your user takes to convert. The end goal is to create sales or to into newsletter subscribers. convert new users Here’s how a conversion path can play out in a typical business: A user clicks on a business’s ad link They arrive on a landing page The user reads and interacts with the landing page content. This includes downloading an ebook, watching a video, or reading a post They click on a specific call to action Your user signs for up your newsletter, buys your product, or does both They then arrive at a thank you page where they can carry out more actions A user’s journey along your conversion path ends when they either abandon the path or take action that benefits your business. The goal is to get your users to drop in their email addresses to receive your communication. Or to purchase your product or service. Why conversion paths matter When you can chart out a conversion path, you’ll learn where a user stops interacting with your brand and makes an exit. You’ll get a clear picture of what isn’t working.  You may notice browse abandonment, cart abandonment, or failure during the payment stage. Such insights help you improve your funnel. Creating different conversion paths also gives you the opportunity to personalize them. You can use demographic information, search behaviors, locations, and other details to optimize your conversion paths. Clear conversion paths create structure and benefit both your business and the customer. You’ll improve your conversion rate and your customer gets a better online experience in the process. The key parts of a conversion path and ways to optimize them There are four main parts of a conversion path. Whether you’re building one from scratch or attempting to study the ones you currently have, you’ll find the following components: Your inbound marketing like email newsletter campaigns, ads, social media posts, blog posts, and others The landing page a user arrives at after they click a link A call to action The thankyou page after a user has taken action These four steps or parts of a conversion path draw new or existing users along a journey where every step either convinces them to go forward or abandon your website right away. Let’s take a look at each step and some factors you can optimize to improve your conversions. Inbound marketing Your inbound marketing is anything that brings potential customers into your conversion path. Ads, blog posts, social media videos, and other content are the entryway that engages people. Since inbound marketing is the starting point, you need to ensure that it’s optimized. Here are some things you can do: Carry out research on your target audience. Learn what they like and what their pain points are. Use SEO tools, Google Analytics, and other tools to learn more about your potential customers. Create regular content via blogs and social media content. Use the right keywords and phrases in your content so that search engines and social media algorithms can understand the context of your content. Keep your content simple, friendly, and easy to understand. Trying to sound clever and sophisticated rarely works and only puts people off. Once your audience is engaged, you can then lead them further down the conversion path. Landing page optimization Once a user clicks on an ad or opens a link from your email campaign, they’ll arrive at a landing page. It’s critical to personalize your landing page for different inbound campaigns. A landing page for an ad campaign will differ from one that’s launched from your social media posts. Since you may have many conversion paths, sometimes thousands, it’s not feasible to create a separate landing page for every single path. But it does help to make landing pages for different sources of incoming traffic. For example, plan your overall marketing strategy so that your email content matches up to the landing page content when people click on a link within the email. Likewise, clicks from social media should lead to one that reflects what you posted there. An ad by Humble Bundle on Social Media The landing page matches the ad content Your best bet at optimizing your landing pages is to . Such a tool can: use a solid landing page tool Create well-designed landing pages that match your website theme and create a good user experience Add optin forms, lead magnets, and digital downloads A good landing page will also help you create calls to action buttons and thank you pages. But we’ll take a closer look at those in the following sections. Calls to action Put yourself in your user’s shoes. They’ve clicked on your ad and they liked the content on your landing page enough that they haven’t rushed to close the window. What next? You need to provide them with some kind of action to take to complete the journey and to also strengthen your relationship with your potential customer. A call to action button is a critical part of a landing page and the conversion path. You want to make your calls to action descriptive, specific, and action-oriented. If you’re inviting your user to download something for free in exchange for their email, don’t just create a button with the word ‘Download’ on it. Say ‘Download your free ebook now’ or ‘Click to create a healthier you’. Keep testing with different calls to action to see what works for you. Thank you pages When a user has bought a product or signed up with your newsletter, make sure that they get a dedicated landing page once they take action. A simple message that flashes ‘Subscription confirmed’ or ‘Thank you for your purchase’ and nothing else misses the opportunity to engage your customers more. Once a user has taken action, redirect them to a thank you page where you confirm that they’ll receive a weekly email, an onboarding message, or shipping details in a short while. You can then create links and ask them to keep reading or to look at similar products. Such options keep people on your website longer and also creates a positive impression of your brand. Create the best conversion paths to grow your business Building your conversion paths isn’t a one-and-done activity. An important ongoing activity is to analyze how well your marketing is working. You can use to track the effectiveness of your conversion paths. With experimentation and consistent tracking, you’ll find what works best for your company and audience. And you’ll be able to refine the communication paths that lead to more sales and more lead building. Google Analytics

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How to Leverage Conversion Paths to Boost Conversions

Content platforms thrive on suggesting related content to their users. The more relevant items the platform can provide, the longer the user will stay on the site, which often translates to increased ad revenue for the company. If you’ve ever visited a news website, online publication, or blogging platform, you’ve likely been exposed to a recommendation engine. Each of these takes input based on your reading history and then suggests more content you might like. As a simple solution, a platform might implement a tag-based recommendation engine — you read a “Business” article, so here are five more articles tagged “Business.” However, an even better approach to building a recommendation engine is to use . similarity search and a machine learning algorithm In this article, we’ll build a Python Flask app that uses — a similarity search service — to create our very own article recommendation engine. Pinecone Demo App Overview Below, you can see a brief animation of how our demo app works. Ten articles are initially displayed on the page. The user can choose any combination of those 10 articles to represent their reading history. When the user clicks the Submit button, the reading history is used as input to query the article database, and then 10 more related articles are displayed to the user. As you can see, the related articles returned are exceptionally accurate! There are 1,024 possible combinations of reading history that can be used as input in this example, and every combination produces meaningful results. So, how did we do it? In building the app, we first found a from Kaggle. This dataset contains 143,000 news articles from 15 major publications, but we’re just using the first 20,000. (The full dataset that this one is derived from contains over two million articles!) dataset of news articles We then cleaned up the dataset by renaming a couple of columns and dropping those that are unnecessary. Next, we ran the articles through an embedding model to create vector embeddings — that’s, metadata for machine learning algorithms to determine similarities between various inputs. We used the . We then inserted these vector embeddings into a vector index managed by Pinecone. Average Word Embeddings Model With the vector embeddings added to the index, we’re ready to start finding related content. When users submit their reading history, a request is made to an API endpoint that uses Pinecone’s SDK to query the index of vector embeddings. The endpoint returns 10 similar news articles and displays them in the app’s UI. That’s it! Simple enough, right? If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you can . The contains instructions for how to run the app locally on your own machine. find the code for this app on GitHub README Demo App Code Walkthrough We’ve gone through the inner workings of the app, but how did we actually build it? As noted earlier, this is a Python Flask app that utilizes the Pinecone SDK. The HTML uses a template file, and the rest of the frontend is built using static CSS and JS assets. To keep things simple, all of the backend code is found in the file, which we’ve reproduced in full below: app.py from dotenv import load_dotenv
from flask import Flask
from flask import render_template
from flask import request
from flask import url_for
import json
import os
import pandas as pd
import pinecone
import re
import requests
from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
from statistics import mean
import swifter

app = Flask(__name__)

PINECONE_INDEX_NAME = "article-recommendation-service"
DATA_FILE = "articles.csv"
NROWS = 20000

def initialize_pinecone():
    load_dotenv()
    PINECONE_API_KEY = os.environ["PINECONE_API_KEY"]
    pinecone.init(api_key=PINECONE_API_KEY)

def delete_existing_pinecone_index():
    if PINECONE_INDEX_NAME in pinecone.list_indexes():
        pinecone.delete_index(PINECONE_INDEX_NAME)

def create_pinecone_index():
    pinecone.create_index(name=PINECONE_INDEX_NAME, metric="cosine", shards=1)
    pinecone_index = pinecone.Index(name=PINECONE_INDEX_NAME)

    return pinecone_index

def create_model():
    model = SentenceTransformer('average_word_embeddings_komninos')

    return model

def prepare_data(data):
    # rename id column and remove unnecessary columns
    data.rename(columns={"Unnamed: 0": "article_id"}, inplace = True)
    data.drop(columns=['date'], inplace = True)

    # extract only first few sentences of each article for quicker vector calculations
    data['content'] = data['content'].fillna('')
    data['content'] = data.content.swifter.apply(lambda x: ' '.join(re.split(r'(?<=[.:;])\s', x)[:4]))
    data['title_and_content'] = data['title'] + ' ' + data['content']

    # create a vector embedding based on title and article columns
    encoded_articles = model.encode(data['title_and_content'], show_progress_bar=True)
    data['article_vector'] = pd.Series(encoded_articles.tolist())

    return data

def upload_items(data):
    items_to_upload = [(row.id, row.article_vector) for i, row in data.iterrows()]
    pinecone_index.upsert(items=items_to_upload)

def process_file(filename):
    data = pd.read_csv(filename, nrows=NROWS)
    data = prepare_data(data)
    upload_items(data)
    pinecone_index.info()

    return data

def map_titles(data):
    return dict(zip(uploaded_data.id, uploaded_data.title))

def map_publications(data):
    return dict(zip(uploaded_data.id, uploaded_data.publication))

def query_pinecone(reading_history_ids):
    reading_history_ids_list = list(map(int, reading_history_ids.split(',')))
    reading_history_articles = uploaded_data.loc[uploaded_data['id'].isin(reading_history_ids_list)]

    article_vectors = reading_history_articles['article_vector']
    reading_history_vector = [*map(mean, zip(*article_vectors))]

    query_results = pinecone_index.query(queries=[reading_history_vector], top_k=10)
    res = query_results[0]

    results_list = []

    for idx, _id in enumerate(res.ids):
        results_list.append({
            "id": _id,
            "title": titles_mapped[int(_id)],
            "publication": publications_mapped[int(_id)],
            "score": res.scores[idx],
        })

    return json.dumps(results_list)

initialize_pinecone()
delete_existing_pinecone_index()
pinecone_index = create_pinecone_index()
model = create_model()
uploaded_data = process_file(filename=DATA_FILE)
titles_mapped = map_titles(uploaded_data)
publications_mapped = map_publications(uploaded_data)

@app.route("/")
def index():
    return render_template("index.html")

@app.route("/api/search", methods=["POST", "GET"])
def search():
    if request.method == "POST":
        return query_pinecone(request.form.history)
    if request.method == "GET":
        return query_pinecone(request.args.get("history", ""))
    return "Only GET and POST methods are allowed for this endpoint" Let’s go over the important parts of the file so that we understand it. app.py On lines 1–14, we import our app’s dependencies. Our app relies on the following: for reading environment variables from the file dotenv .env for the web application setup flask for working with JSON json also, for getting environment variables os for working with the dataset pandas for working with the Pinecone SDK pinecone for working with regular expressions (RegEx) re for making API requests to download our dataset requests for some handy stats methods statistics for our embedding model sentence_transformers for working with the pandas dataframe swifter On line 16, we provide some boilerplate code to tell Flask the name of our app. On lines 18–20, we define some constants that will be used in the app. These include the name of our Pinecone index, the file name of the dataset, and the number of rows to read from the CSV file. On lines 22–25, our method gets our API key from the file and uses it to initialize Pinecone. initialize_pinecone .env On lines 27–29, our method searches our Pinecone instance for indexes with the same name as the one we’re using (“article-recommendation-service”). If an existing index is found, we delete it. delete_existing_pinecone_index On lines 31–35, our method creates a new index using the name we chose (“article-recommendation-service”), the “cosine” proximity metric, and only one shard. create_pinecone_index On lines 37–40, our method uses the library to work with the Average Word Embeddings Model. We’ll encode our vector embeddings using this model later. create_model sentence_transformers On lines 62–68, our method reads the CSV file and then calls the and methods on it. Those two methods are described next. process_file prepare_data upload_items On lines 42–56, our method adjusts the dataset by renaming the first “id” column and dropping the “date” column. It then grabs the first four lines of each article and combines them with the article title to create a new field that serves as the data to encode. We could create vector embeddings based on the entire body of the article, but four lines will suffice in order to speed up the encoding process. prepare_data On lines 58–60, our method creates a vector embedding for each article by encoding it using our model. The vector embeddings are then inserted into the Pinecone index. upload_items On lines 70–74, our and methods create some dictionaries of the titles and publication names to make it easier to find articles by their IDs later. map_titles map_publications Each of the methods we’ve described so far is called on lines 98–104 when the backend app is started. This work prepares us for the final step of actually querying the Pinecone index based on user input. On lines 106–116, we define two routes for our app: one for the home page and one for the API endpoint. The home page serves up the template file along with the JS and CSS assets, and the API endpoint provides the search functionality for querying the Pinecone index. index.html Finally, on lines 76–96, our method takes the user’s reading history input, converts it into a vector embedding, and then queries the Pinecone index to find similar articles. This method is called when the endpoint is hit, which occurs whenever the user submits a new search query. query_pinecone /api/search For the visual learners out there, here’s a diagram outlining how the app works: Example Scenarios So, putting this all together, what does the user experience look like? Let’s look at three scenarios: a user interested in sports, a user interested in technology, and a user interested in politics. The sports user selects the first two articles about Serena Williams and Andy Murray, two famous tennis players, to use their reading history. After submitting their choices, the app responds with articles about Wimbledon, the US Open, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal. Spot on! The technology user selects articles about Samsung and Apple. After they submit their choices, the app responds with articles about Samsung, Apple, Google, Intel, and iPhones. Great recommendations again! The politics user selects a single article about voter fraud. After they submit their choice, the app responds with articles about voter ID, the US 2020 election, voter turnout, and claims of illegal voting (and why they don’t hold up). Three for three! Our recommendation engine is proving to be incredibly useful. Conclusion We’ve now created a simple Python app to solve a real-world problem. If content sites can recommend relevant content to their users, users will enjoy the content more and will spend more time on the site, resulting in more revenue for the company. Everyone wins! Similarity search helps provide better suggestions for your users. And Pinecone, as a similarity search service, makes it easy for you to provide recommendations to your users so that you can focus on what you do best — building an engaging platform filled with content worth reading.

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Build an Article Recommendation Engine Using Machine Learning

Updated on January 12th, 2021 Since the publication of this report, multiple vaccines have gained approval and the largest-ever global vaccination campaign is rolling out, with nearly 30 million vaccine doses administered to people in over 40 countries.  However, this hasn’t stopped dark net vendors from touting fake offers of vaccines. In fact, the opposite has happened: the numbers of vaccine advertisements has exploded and the asking prices have doubled or even quadrupled. We believe this is because of a spike in demand from individuals who don’t wish to wait weeks or months to receive their vaccination from their countries’ governments. In the past month, we noticed that a dark net search for Covid-19 vaccines returns multiple pages of results, amounting to hundreds of advertisements, presenting an overall 400%-plus increase since early December. The screenshot below shows a simple search query that returned over 340 advertisements, in 34 pages, compared to just 8 pages of results from a similar query we ran early December. The prices of vaccines have also risen sharply. In our previous report we saw an average median price tag of $250. Now our research shows vendors have now doubled or even quadrupled their prices, asking $500 or even up to $1000 for an unspecified dose. The range of vaccine brands has also changed. Before approved vaccines started to be distributed globally, we saw sellers offering ‘made in China’ vaccines, which were unbranded and not FDA approved. Since the distribution of FDA-approved brands globally, most sellers are now advertising selling these as named brands, or simply not specifying the vaccine’s brand. To test how trustworthy a dark net transaction is, our researchers placed an order for a vaccine dose from a vendor, using Telegram for the interaction. We got the vendor’s contact details and phone number via a dark net forum and contacted them via their Telegram user name. We were offered a Chinese vaccine – with the price tag of $750. We made the payment using Bitcoin, sent our delivery address and asked for the shipment details. After a few days with no response, we received a message from the vendor saying the vaccine had been shipped to our address. A few days later, the vendor’s account was deleted and – you guessed it – we are still waiting to receive our package. This is just one example, but you can perhaps draw your own conclusions about how reliable a dark net transaction is likely to be. We also noticed that several vendors claim to supply vaccine doses in bulk, not just single shots. One of the vendors we communicated with claimed to be able to sell an order totaling in 10,000 vials, enough for 5000 people (every vaccine needs to be delivered in two doses, 21 days apart). Due to the size of the shipment the vendor suggested shipping it in 3 – 4 different shipments, at a total price of $30,000. Based on our experience of attempting to purchase a single dose, it is likely that a buyer would  never receive anything at all, let alone genuine approved vaccines. Published December 11th, 2020 Range of counterfeit coronavirus vaccines and medicines offered on darknet Vaccine-related phishing campaigns take advantage of the global race to deliver the shots Covid vaccine-related domains show sharp rise in parallel to news of successful results in clinical trials Although the Covid-19 pandemic continues to spread and disrupt our lives, societies and economies, there is now light appearing at the end of the tunnel. Several vaccines are being fast-tracked towards mass production in a race to overcome the coronavirus crisis and, in the longer term, to improve our response to future pandemics. The past year has seen an unprecedented global effort to develop shots that will bring the pandemic to an end, with the eyes of the world watching. Moreover, we are seeing progress. Inc. and BioNTech SE’s vaccine has already been , with other countries expected to follow suit in the coming weeks after a study showed it was 95% effective while vaccines from Inc. and the Russian Sputnik vaccine have achieved similar results, according to trial analyses. Plc and its partner, the University of Oxford, has also had favorable results for its vaccine. Pfizer approved for use in the UK Moderna AstraZeneca Unfortunately, while most of us are watching with hope, there are some watching with greed and malice in their minds, with the intent of capitalizing on people's concerns about Covid-19 and desire to be protected against the risk of catching it. Coronavirus 'medicines' and vaccines available on the dark net – at a price The news that coronavirus vaccines are now available and in the process of being administered at scale via the world countries healthcare systems has driven global interest and expectation. Yet for those who have the means and do not want to wait, there are of course vendors on the dark net claiming to have a range of vaccines for sale. Check Point Research (CPR) found a stream of posts on the dark net from sources claiming to have a range of “Coronavirus vaccines ” or “Coronavirus remedies” for sale. In fact, Europol, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, has already issued an early notification on vaccine-related crime during the pandemic. warning The range of medicines advertised by these vendors is extensive, from “available corona virus vaccine $250” to “Say bye bye to COVID19=CHLOROQUINE PHOSPHATE”” to “Buy fast.CORONA-VIRUS VACCINE IS OUT NOW.”, and we have no way of knowing whether these are genuine. Screenshots of ads from the Darknet about covid-19 “remedies” and vaccines All of the vendors found only accept payments in bitcoin, minimizing the chance of being traced; casting further doubt on the authenticity of the medicines, they are selling. When researchers communicated with one vendor, they offered to sell an unspecified Covid-19 vaccine for 0.01 BTC (around US$300), and claimed that 14 doses were required. This advice contradicts official announcements, which state that some coronavirus vaccines two shots per person, each administered three weeks apart. require Coronavirus vaccine – just for $300 for 14 doses! (We cannot guarantee the vendor is a medical expert In this example, the seller claims to have stock from a leading pharmaceutical, a newly approved vaccine available for sale and delivery to the UK, U.S. and Spain that is just one WhatsApp or Telegram chat away! Supposed coronavirus vaccines for sale in the darknet In the following advert, we see a vendor offering Chloroquine as a regular coronavirus “treatment”, for only US$10 with the claim that “Hydroxychloroquine, a medicine for malaria that has been touted as a treatment for coronavirus.” This follows statements from outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump who touted the use of hydroxychloroquine to ward off coronavirus, in on to the advice from his own public health officials. contradicti Advert for cheap hydroxychloroquinine as a treatment for coronavirus Sharp rise in Covid-19 vaccine related domains in November November’s positive news about vaccine trials and imminent availability has also driven a surge in new web domains that relate to Covid-19 or vaccines being registered. Our data shows that since the beginning of November there were 1062 new domains, which contain the word “vaccine” that were registered, out of which 400 also contain “covid” or “corona”. 6 of these sites were found to be “suspicious”. These figures are equivalent to the previous 3 months (August, September and October) combined. New vaccine-related phishing email campaigns Besides trying to sell fake Covid-19 medications and vaccines, threat actors are also using vaccine-related news as bait for their phishing campaigns. We have previously that cyber criminals are taking advantage of vaccine developments, resulting in malspam campaigns seen in the wild. reported These emails delivered malicious .EXE files with the name that when clicked on, installs an InfoStealer capable of gathering information, such as login information, usernames and passwords from the user’s computer to enable threat actors to take over accounts. “Download_Covid 19 New approved vaccines.23.07.2020.exe” Another recent email campaign detected by Check Point Research, contained the subject “ ” (in English and Spanish) and a malicious executable file named “ ” which has been detected as . pfizer’s Covid vaccine: 11 things you need to know Covid-19 vaccine brief summary Agent Tesla Agent Tesla is an advanced RAT functioning as a keylogger and information stealer capable of monitoring and collecting a victim’s keyboard input, system clipboard, taking screenshots, and exfiltrating credentials belonging to a variety of software installed on the victim’s machine (including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Outlook email client). We expect that this vaccine-related campaign is the first of many more that will target both organizations and individuals over the coming months, as the race to deliver vaccines globally approaches the final stages. Attacks have been attributed to state-backed hackers as well as criminal groups.  Microsoft in a recent report that it has detected attempts by Russian- and North Korean-backed hackers to steal valuable data from leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers.  The company said that most of the attacks in recent months were unsuccessful, but provided no information on how many succeeded or how serious those breaches were. Chinese state-backed hackers , the U.S. government said in July while announcing criminal charges. said have also been targeting vaccine-makers Pandemic-related developments will feature in 2021’s cyber threats The Covid-19 pandemic has been a true ‘black swan’ – an ultra-rare yet high impact event that has derailed business as usual. Hackers have also sought to take advantage of the pandemic’s disruption: 58% of security professionals have reported an increase in cyber threats since lockdowns started. In a , we detailed what we expect to see in the cyber landscape over the next 12 months, and Covid-19 related issues were prominent. As Covid-19 will continue to dominate headlines, news of vaccine developments or new national restrictions will continue to be used in , just as they have been through 2020. The pharma companies developing vaccines will also continue to be targeted by from criminals or nation-states looking to exploit the situation. recent report phishing campaigns malicious attacks To protect yourself and your organization against stealthy phishing attacks, here are our tips: Check the full email address on any message you receive and be alert to hyperlinks that may contain misspellings of the actual domain name. Verify you are using a URL from an authentic website: One way to do this is to click on links in emails, and instead click on the link from the Google results page after searching for it. not Beware of lookalike domains: spelling errors in emails or websites, and unfamiliar email senders. Protect mobile and endpoint browsing with advanced cyber security solutions, which prevent browsing to malicious phishing web sites, whether known or unknown Use two-factor authentication to verify any change to account information or wire instructions Never supply login credentials or personal information in response to a text or email. Regularly monitor financial accounts. Keep all software and apps up to date. Always note the language in the email Social engineering techniques are designed to take advantage of human nature. This includes the fact that people are more likely to make mistakes when they are in a hurry and are inclined to follow the orders of people in positions of authority. commonly use these techniques to convince their targets to ignore their potential suspicions about an email and click on a link or open an attachment. : Phishing attacks Data used in this report present data detected by Check Point’s Threat Prevention technologies, stored and analyzed in . ThreatCloud provides real-time threat intelligence derived from hundreds of millions of sensors worldwide, over networks, endpoints and mobiles. The intelligence is enriched with AI-based engines and exclusive research data from the Check Point Research (CPR) – The intelligence & Research Arm of Check Point. ThreatCloud

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HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your  background. I’m Zafer. I was born in Eskişehir, and studied CS at Middle East Technical University. Currently, I’m an Ashoka fellow, and focused on impact- and human-focused international social establishments. My goal is to change the world by making special education and education in general as accessible as possible to all the children in the world. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? Otsimo designs gamified education software mobile applications that are highly customizable and personalized using state-of-the-art technology for kids aged 1-8 who have developmental or learning disorders such as autism and down syndrome, to facilitate learning and skill-building. Otsimo has two apps focusing on developing motor, core, cognitive, speech, and language skills as well as reading, writing, and basic math. What is the origin story? My little brother Alper was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he was 2. Back then, we were fortunate enough to get him the special education he needed, but some subjects like colors and math were still difficult for him to learn because he couldn’t focus enough on the subjects. One day I noticed he was really engaging with my smartphone, so I got really excited with the possibilities of finding a game that is suitable for him to play and learn, but could not find any. I asked my dear friend if we could make a simple color matching game to be played on mobile phones to see where it would go and that’s where it all started. In a matter of days, he managed to learn the colors and really enjoyed the game at the same time. We then researched and worked with professionals in the field to make the app more comprehensive and used technologies in the background to make it fit for all needs as no child with special needs had the same exact needs. To this day, we have touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of children with special needs from across the world. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? Our team is the best team working on a solution such as ours. They are all good people and they know how to adapt. When you are doing for-profit social impact work, you need with you people that are good and kind in nature who understand the importance and weight of the work we’re doing but do not strictly focus on the monetary gains. I would trust each and every one of my team members with my eyes closed and know that I can depend on them even during times of skyrocketing growth. Also, although the origin story of our work is near and dear to my heart, every member of our team has also taken it upon themselves and embraced Alper and this cause as I would. In the end, we did not . We just took what already worked and innovated upon that. What we did is we took the existing methods that worked but were not accessible enough and the personal life experience that is actually the reality of many many people across the world and gathered them into a working little machine that is for the greater good. reinvent the wheel We use novel technologies as well as some traditional methods that we know work. Sometimes as humans we are not always aware of the problems faced by a group of people. However, we are striving to change that and make sure that this group of people also has access to opportunities through our solutions. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? I would work at a startup! I think I would have especially gravitated towards the mobile gaming/education sphere because I’m really interested in, maybe a little obsessed with, what I’m doing. definitely At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? It is difficult to measure success in our field of work as there are a lot of metrics. But basically, we take a look at the statistics of how many children get special education and how many hours of special education are provided. In addition, we keep tabs on our MRR and growth rate. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? This may be a little cheesy, but the positive feedback we receive from the families and caregivers of the children we are helping is almost always amazing to hear. The first time someone sent us an email saying that their previously non-verbal child started to say mom I really got emotional, thinking back to the times we had a similar reaction to my brother’s progress and development. Now we can even offer our users charts and graphs, exactly pointing out how their child has grown, to return the favor. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? I am truly excited about zero-emission technologies and green-tech. What I’m most worried about is what we have been hearing more and more of late about monopolization in the technology sector by big companies like Google and Apple, and the consequences of the measures taken against this movement. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? HackerNoon reports the trailblazers of our time, ahead of time. I love how I can find quality content produced by real professionals in the technology industry. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? I would say to my 21-year-old self to take care of my mental health and strength. We are dealing with hot and heavy topics on a daily basis, plus there are a ton of things happening across the world. I found out that mental strength is the thing I needed constantly along the road. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? I have not expected remote working culture to be this difficult. There are many moving parts that need to fit into the perfect place to ensure both the work is done but also the people are happy in the process. I have learned that starting small in terms of working remotely and then making it hybrid worked the best in our case. Giving people the flexibility helped us avoid a lot of stress while also making social distancing and remote work possible. Vote for Otsimo as the startup of the year, Ankara.

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Tackling Learning Disorders With Technology: Hasan Zafer Elcik, Otsimo's Co-founder & CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background. I am Gaurav Jain, Co-Founder at , Adobe Certified Expert-Magento Commerce Business Practitioner, from Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Being a computer engineer and possessing extensive marketing skills, I handle all kinds of customer queries at MageComp. MageComp When I am not working, you’ll find me reading books or traveling somewhere in unexplored places. Also, I am a speaker at Magento meetups. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? MageComp is a Magento company, a leading provider of Magento extensions, services, and customization. Our company is a one-stop solution for E-commerce stores from Magento development, migration, upgradation to marketing and SEO. What is the origin story? While working on internet security and ethical hacking, I got an opportunity as a marketing manager at one of the Magento-based companies. And there when my journey started in Magento. Back in 2012, I found a job in this company. It was a great opportunity, and hence I accepted the offer. That was the time when I didn’t have much knowledge about the Magento platform and its future. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? With 8+ years of experience in the Magento platform, our team has attained superpowers to solve any problem and mastered the niche from day-by-day learning and implementation. That’s why we name our team “MAvengers.” Our dedicated MAvengers team follows best practices, coding standards, agile methodology to provide flexible, cost-effective, and robust Magento solutions on a timely basis. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing? I might be doing the job at the management level somewhere. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? We measure our metrics by the number of customers, client satisfaction, and contribution to the Magento community. To date, we have successfully completed 600+ projects and served 20,000+ customers in more than 120 countries. Also, we have developed 150+ Magento 1 and Magento 2 extensions, and our numerous services are used by more than 10,000+ store owners & developers globally. What’s most exciting about your traction to date? We escalate ourselves in the Magento industry to prioritize learning and innovation over revenue. From the beginning, we have continually tried to keep up with the requirements of our customers and thus hand over a fruitful result of the most compatible, flexible, and useful Magento development. What technologies are you currently most excited about and most worried about? And why? We are a Magento-based company, and undoubtedly I am excited about the platform. But at the same time worried about the platform too, as Adobe has acquired it. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? Hackernoon is a great medium to connect with technical experts globally. Their articles are knowledgeable, informative, and well briefed. We are passionate about Magento Development and coding innovations, which attracted us to Hackernoon Community. What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? Don't stop dreaming. Success comes to those who work hard. So go for it, chase your dreams! What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? I keep learning every day, but I achieved my goal of becoming an Adobe Certified Expert-Adobe Commerce Business Practitioner this year. MageComp is nominated as . Go vote! Startup of the Year in Ahmedabad

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This article was written entirely by GPT-J. It is published here unedited. You can try GPT-J for free. here I’m going to take a few minutes to go over some of the most important questions I’ve received about writing, as I believe that many writers, myself included, get caught up in the idea that there is one single right way to do things and that everything else is wrong. I’m going to only talk about writing fiction. Writing non-fiction can be approached in similar ways, but I’m not going to spend time on it here. If you want to start your own blog, you can find a lot of good advice here. Under no circumstances are you to write anything that you don’t want to read This is a rule that is often overlooked by new writers. There are many things that people think are good advice, but are actually not. The first thing that I would say, however, is that you should only write what you love. Love of writing will drive you to do it, and if you don’t love writing, you’ll find it difficult to continue. Though I’ve written quite a bit of non-fiction, I don’t like it very much. I used to love it, back when I was a kid. I used to love reading books, and I loved writing. But in my mid-20s, I stopped reading a lot of books, and started writing. I didn’t want to read a lot of books, so I wrote them. I didn’t love my craft, so I wrote about it. I didn’t love writing, so I wrote about it. I was getting paid for it, so I wrote about it. I had a job, so I wrote about it. I didn’t love writing, so I wrote about it. And so on. Over time, I realized that I didn’t love writing, so I stopped doing it. Until the very end, I couldn’t stop. I had to write. Don’t force yourself to write, and don’t force yourself to read. If you really want to write, you’ll find a way to do it. It might not be what you originally intended to do, but as long as you’re happy, it’s good. The “right way” to write is whatever makes you happy.

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Welcome to the second installment of our ModelOps blog series, where we dive deep into the next step in the ModelOps pipeline, Model Training. During Model Training, we feed large volumes of data to our model so it can learn to perform a certain task very well. This blog follows the first post in our series where we cover everything you need to know about Data Acquisition and Preparation and discuss how foundational it is for successful Artificial Intelligence (AI) investments. If you missed it, check as a great lead-in to this post. Training a model to learn how to execute a task is just like any other action that requires learning. Training a dog to “sit” requires countless hours of practice and repetition until the dog obeys consistently. Training to run a marathon requires months of long-distance running. Learning how to ride a bike takes time with gradual improvement until it clicks. In each of these repetitive-learning scenarios, we invest a nontrivial amount of time and resources to master a given task. As you develop your model training process, it is important to consider the time, resources, and corresponding costs of each. Three Categories of Model Training Considerations 1. Model Approach Considerations What is the objective for this model and how do we measure success? Is our objective comparable to an existing state of the art (SoA) solution on the market or completely novel? How will our data (structured or unstructured) impact the modeling approach we take? Do we need to build a solution entirely from scratch or can we use open source architectures as a starting point? 2. Tools & Frameworks Considerations Which machine learning framework and programming language are we going to use? Are we going to build custom training code, use a tool that can help us, or use a combination of both? 3. Experimental Considerations How long will it take to train our model and what hardware resources do we need? What is the overall investment to successfully complete this process?Does our experiment require hyperparameter optimization? How are we going to monitor the training experiments and implement early stopping if needed? When building out a model training process, the first thing to consider is the business application and the goal of the project. Odds are high you have already defined your goal before you arrived at this step in your AI journey. However, revisiting the objective and defining how you are going to measure its success is critical when deciding on modeling approaches. The quickest way to achieve your goal while saving time and money is to start by exploring which models might be available within the open source community. Many SoA architectures exist in open source form and can serve as the foundation for your data scientists to build upon. Rather than waste investment dollars reinventing the wheel, your team can use one of these existing architectures that other AI researchers spent months developing (e.g., ResNet variants for image classification, RCNN for object detection, or BERT for Natural Language Processing). Selecting an already available model that aligns to your objective as your model base will save your teams a considerable amount of development time and costs. Once you have defined your objective and chosen a solid base model to build upon, the next decision to consider involves the tools and frameworks you will use to build your model. Right off the bat, you will want to decide whether using a training platform is the route to take or if you instead prefer to build your pipeline by hand. Low- and no-code commercial and open source training platforms (e.g., AWS SageMaker, RunwayML) can in some cases automate most of this build process for organizations. While thinking about the tradeoffs that come with this approach, it is important to make this decision based on the maturity of your data science team and ultimately settle on a solution that will allow your team to optimize its build process. In the case that you decide to build your training pipeline from scratch, most common programming languages (e.g., Python, R, Java) provide access to user-friendly libraries that make ML feasible to implement. Moreover, many common ML frameworks, including Tensorflow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, and others, make common AI architectures and other ML techniques easily accessible. With many of these open source languages and frameworks at your fingertips, your team should ultimately select the tools with which they are most comfortable. Tool familiarity will reduce, and hopefully eliminate, any learning curve expenses. Additionally, by using familiar tools, your team can efficiently set up all model training code and kick off their experiments without any unnecessary delays. With a plan in place and tools identified, there are several implementation and execution factors to consider—starting with hardware. Training a ML model is computationally expensive, and takes time. To minimize this training time, developers commonly leverage GPUs because they can process multiple computations in parallel. But this hardware comes at a cost, and requires teams to balance their objectives against the amount of GPU usage they need, the number of training experiments required, and the budget. Once the hardware decision is confirmed, your development team should consider a set of experimental conditions to include: Will your dataset require data augmentation to increase the variation of samples your model processes? If so, your team will need to add in a preprocessing step during training that might randomly perform flips, translations, rotations, scales, crops or noise additions to the data. Would your model benefit from hyperparameter optimization? In other words, should you set up your experiment to test several combinations of loss functions, optimizers, learning rates, batch size, and number of layers? Free products like Ray Tune and MLflow make it easy for teams to set up these experiments and constantly monitor results during training. Building a successful model training process requires several key considerations. As a result, this step in the ModelOps process can be the lengthiest and most computationally expensive direct cost. To minimize budgetary impact, it is important to select the correct combination of model approach, tools, frameworks, and experimental factors that best suit your use case and technical team maturity. At the end of the day, remember that every AI investment is unique and will look different. For those reasons, it is important to always make these decisions based on what makes the most sense for your organization. Make sure to check out our next blog in the ModelOps series: Model Code Versioning: Reduce Friction. Create Stability. Automate.

3 Categories of Model Training Considerations

Imagine wanting to move $10 in crypto, and being charged $40 in transaction fees, aka “gas fees”. Imagine being a new artist, and having to pay over $100 to mint your latest [what?] ---- And, imagine your surprise when you realize that transaction fees are higher than at your legacy bank? With the astronomical rise in demand for decentralized finance, decentralized apps (dApps), smart contracts, and NFTs, Ethereum too has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, with that growth came intense taxation of the Ethereum network, gas fees reaching $30-40 a transaction, and up to $140 to mint an NFT. To quote Mark Jeffrey in a recent , “Ethereum has been claiming it’s going to fix itself and all its problems for years … So these other chains said, Cryptonized interview ‘Well, you know what we should do? Rip out all the stuff that causes these high gas fees… basically pull out all the bad wiring, … [and] put new wiring in, which makes everything cheap and super fast.” Thus, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains were born. The EVM is a software-based microprocessor that runs smart contracts and allows them to work together on the Ethereum network. Popular EVMs include Polygon, Fantom, and Binance Smart Chain. Without EVM, the smart contracts dominating the DeFi space would be unable to run. The idea behind the creation of EVM chains being to “Fix Ethereum, don’t wait for Ethereum to fix itself,” says Jeffrey. Moving smart contracts between the EVM chains and the Ethereum network is done through cloning. You can also send coins through bridges, which are basically exchanges that live on different networks. “These bridges are rising and proliferating very quickly, and being able to move coins is becoming extremely easy,” says Jeffrey. With the bridges and EVM compatibility, the other chains are becoming massively popular. “Binance Smart Chain quickly rose to about six times the number of transactions of Ethereum itself within a space of months,” adds Jeffrey. The Binance Smart Chain project was started in September of 2020, and by April of 2021, was worth , and is already the home of many projects like Aave and Pancake Swap. Polygon is currently home to around , due to its ease of use in creating custom blockchains. Fantom is new to the game, but quickly growing among DeFi and blockchain developers. $30 billion dollars 150 projects To date, no other protocol has come close to the level and adaptation and variety of offerings that are on the EVM chain. Bitcoin does not allow for smart contracts; Nakamoto created merge-mining, which allows side chains to be run on the bitcoin blockchain, which could theoretically allow for DeFi and smart contracts, but it never took off in a major way. Bitcoin has long been considered “digital gold”, and Ethereum and EVM chains have stepped up to fill the gap in utility. There are multiple blockchain virtual machines, but the beauty of EVM is the universal language used, allowing other projects to transplant the language and have it working quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens with these other chains, as the ease of access to development and innovation broadens.

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How Ethereum Virtual Machine Chains Fix Ethereum 

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background. I’m Co-founder and CEO of DoxyChain and winner of the Forbes 25 under 25 award. I’m member of the Global Shapers Community, an initiative of the World Economic Forum. Previously, I worked for the Warsaw Stock Exchange in the WSE Private Market project - a market for tokenization of assets using blockchain technology. Also took part in several deep tech projects in Poland and Singapore, among others. I’m also member of the former working group in the Polish Ministry of Digitalisation on DLT and blockchain. What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do? DoxyChain. It is a next-generation blockchain document management software (DMS). Powered by its own blockchain, DoxyChain is an innovation that combines electronic signature, workflows optimization, and enhanced security, which means we are the very first user-oriented holistic digital solution. We democratize blockchain and set new standards for digital documents space. What is the origin story? DoxyChain idea emerged during the GlobalLegal Hackathon held in Warsaw Google Campus at the beginning of 2019, where the four future co-founders Gabriel Dymowski, Piotr Żelazko, Marcin Lorenc, and Daniel Bigs, received the award for their "Blockchain Power-of-Attorney" project. After that competition,, the team received multiple inquiries and questions about the solution's functionalities and availability. That became an indicator of the market trust for a blockchain-based solutions. Yet before the entity was set up in September 2019, the team ran various business, legal, tech checkups to explore the market pain points, opportunities, risks and shape the revolutionary platform. Verified by the Covid-19 pandemic, the market needs happen to be way wider than just a PoA, which made the team start working on the app for all the documents (including various contracts), digitization, and management. After several MVP implementations and assumptions checks, DoxyChain launched their platform in Q2 2021 in Poland as B2B SaaS, also addressing the needs of enterprise clients with a dedicated offer for them. #What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem? Some of the core founders know each other for more than 7 years. We share a passion for technology and disruptive solutions. We are not afraid to be different, and we are not afraid to be judged for our revolutionary ideas. The experiences of every team member complement each other. We have a talented lawyer, 2 blockchain geniuses, and a business growth hacker. We communicate openly, know our strong and weak spots, listen to the more experienced advisors, and learn every day. We bring the next-gem solution to the market, and we are sure we are doing the right thing. If you weren't building your startup, what would you be doing? If we weren't building the DoxyChain startup, we would be building another tech-related project. All of us have a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Analytical and critical thinking help me spot the pain points and come up with ways to resolve those. All of us would be connected to the blockchain market one way or another. #At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics? Basically, we have just launched. The 3 main metrics crucial for us are the number of users, market awareness about DoxyChain, and partnerships/network. What's most exciting about your traction to date? It took us a while to test the platform before going public with SaaS. However, we already have 25+ paying SMEs. Besides, our resell partners are what we are most excited about: Wolters Kluwer Poland and Oracle for Startups among them. What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why? Mostly I am excited about blockchain since I have been in that market for a while now. Obviously, every technology has pros and cons. The question is what the balance is. I personally took part in a debate, "Does blockchain bring more harm than good?" and although the end result was "No," I listened to several good arguments about DLT cons. There are risks. The approach we take in DoxyChain is that we try to foresee those and make them part of our development strategy. What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform? The content quality and transparency are what I like about HackerNoon. Real market stakeholders write stories and their messages are super meaningful to other industry participants. The tech focus is also a reason why I like you, guys! What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself? Buy crypto :D I think the advice would be to make as many valuable connections as possible because network really matters and to continue humbly to pursue your goal no matter what. What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing? Hard work really pays off, be patient and trust the process. Vote for DoxyChain as the . startup of the year, Warsaw, Poland

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All about the OTT App Market The best over-the-top, or OTT, apps provide an essential turnkey to offer customized solutions. find this a potential opportunity to launch a scalable application in just a matter of weeks! For example, Netflix or Hulu over-the-top services have turned the entertainment sector into a profitable industry, especially for content owners, social media marketers. OTT platform providers These apps enhance popular video streaming services with essential features to stream digitized content in smart TVs, laptops, personal computers, androids, & many more compatible devices. This helps them facilitate elevated user engagement within their best OTT platforms, providing customers with a convenient and ad-free experience. According to , the global video streaming market is expected to have an impactful compound annual growth rate of about . grand view research’s report 21% from 2021 to 2026 Outlining Predominant Market Players: 1. Netflix The ever-growing top of by Marc Randolf and Reed Hastings. Initially, they pioneered the very concept of renting DVDs through the mail by charging viewers a monthly fee. Later, they came up with TVshows, movies directly streaming into , they grew as top distributors and producers for both of the streaming genres mentioned earlier. OTT platform Netflix was started in 1997 customers' PCs. In 2012 To top it all, the movie streaming apps in both media formats, Android and iOS apps, have an impressive collection of content libraries which include original series, movies, and programs captured in distinctive languages, making it well-diversified. Undoubtedly, that states the reason why Netflix carries . paid customers spanning 190 countries Some of the amazing factors that pick up attention are: Netflix largely captures a 63% market share in the U.S. OTT video streaming industry is expected to see a hike of $73.9B by 2024 In the majority, 60% of Gen-Xers watch their streaming videos on a daily basis Watching Pay-TV is fading, and users allot less than 30 mins a day 2. Hulu The pioneer OTT video platform of Hulu, based in the U.S., provides video streaming subscription services. and was initially a joint venture between NBC, News Corp., Province Equity Partners, and later The Walt Disney Co. but is now majority-owned by Disney. Hulu was launched in the year 2007 This OTT streaming solution facilitates users with unique and unfettered access to new episodes, and in 2017 they launched Hulu with Live TV offering over-the-top IPTV services that featured linear television channels.  As of 2021, Hulu carries 41.6 million subscribers. A look into some exceptional facts: As per records, Hulu is known to invest more than $2.5 billion each year on content Surprisingly, Hulu Ads are found to be 2x more effective than TV Ads Hulu OTT TV app allows registration via email as well as social media They offer 43 different video ads to their users every month Hulu is one and only available in two countries: the U.S. and Japan 3. HBO Now HBO Now is one of the biggest inspirations you can use to build your best OTT app development company. It was , and this American subscription video-on-demand streaming service became one of the favourite amongst consumers. launched officially in 2015 The surprising factor catches our attention when we come to know that this 5-year old standalone Subscription-based OTT solution provider facilitates access control to the platform through HBONow.com, Google, or  Apple TV to their users by effortlessly getting switched to Max no extra charge.. Interesting facts that hold and attracts views are: HBO Now has more than 10,000 hrs of content at launch Home Box Office (HBO) was originally named the green channel HBO carries around 44.2M subscribers as of the fourth quarter of 2021 In the early 1970s, they distributed signals using microwave Its first live event coverage was 1973’s Pennsylvania Polka Festival So far, we have seen the industry's pioneer leaders of OTT streaming solutions and their growth over time. Now we will get into its types and check how to create an exclusive OTT app! What are the Types of OTT Apps? There are two major types in which you can capture your audience’s attention when you plan to have your own application specifically designed via OTT app development. Primarily, they are developed where the majority of your audience resides to watch your content. And, that is in mobile or television. Both are broadcasted in audio as well in video formats. You can have your dynamic OTT apps in a categorical manner, suiting its niche preferences. 1. Video When you plan to have an effective interactive streaming platform or an app in the OTT industry, you want to engage markets, as most service providers do, with high-quality video players and content with clickable user interfaces to entice all kinds of demographics on the move. 2. Audio You can set your niche brand by having audio-based OTT platform apps where your users can listen to your curated pieces of OTT content, such as live audio, engaging podcasts, and radio broadcasts. Now, in the next segment, let’s take a look at: Building a Streaming App for OTT Business 1. Wherever your target audience is, be there Due to sophisticated streaming capabilities, providing an engaging viewing experience with high-end quality is the backbone of your OTT development. As a result, you can quickly reach out to every target base through devices like smart TVs, Android, iOS, mobile or web apps;  smartphones; tablets; desktops, etc., and observe user behavior to serve as per their preferences. 2. The Key to Engagement is Personalization Only by providing new streams of material within your white-label OTT platform, your audiences will remain continually engaged. For example, if you broadcast a big movie every Thursday, people will devote their entire schedule to watching it within the OTT branded apps on the go. So, pick which form of personalization will catch their interest and stick to it for a while. 3. Each Screen Has Its Own Viewing Experience Every device has its own unique OTT TV solution viewing experience that is feasible and versatile for your users worldwide. Also, with streaming analytical capabilities, you'll be able to target and analyze every device user who can now effortlessly use your platform and make any subscription transaction. 4. Help Audiences Find Your Content In Seconds Is your information categorically placed in a way that allows easy searchability? If you've already done it, the best method to talk about your popular content is to incorporate a theme around your OTT platform development, such as movies, music shows, kids, news, games, and so on, so that people may find your content under these categories while they're surfing the web in general and have no specific preferences. 5. The way to scale your OTT TV platform success Through analytical tools and feature-rich services offered under a single white-label OTT solution, you may constantly or periodically update your over-the-top software's functionality and control its efficiency. Furthermore, you can now effortlessly acquire insights like audience tracking data, live custom analytics, browsing insights, reviews of your OTT app platform, and more while on the go! Highlighted Features to Determine Your OTT App Revenues 1. Easy App Onboarding Improve your user’s entire OTT streaming app experience by making registration, verification, and profile creation as simple as possible. Make it possible for them to sign up through social networking platforms as well. 2. Search Feature It’s a must for over-the-top app builders to ensure your users have smooth navigation where they can find their favorite content. It's a quintessential function that you may customize with genre, language, and other options. 3. Multilingual Content Definitely, your subscribers might want to enjoy streams globally. They need to understand your content in the language they prefer and make it more relatable. So, your OTT streaming app should be flexible in streaming content in many languages. 4. Watchlist The watchlist integration lets you know whether your viewers want to save items for later viewing. In addition, this feature will aid in creating an in-app notification strategy and monetize new streams that are introduced using their own white-label OTT solution. 5. Payment Gateway Integration Whether you're using Google or Apple as your operating system, you can add your own payment gateway service. In addition, in-app purchases in advanced mobile frameworks are available and made easy for your potential customers. 6. Push-Notifications Use pop-up messages to remind your platform members about their membership expiration dates or promote new popular content available for purchase. This has the potential to boost app engagement and reduce retention rate too. 7. Social Feature You may also freely promote your developed OTT apps by including a share button on social media handles to increase your chances of attracting new users through online marketing. 8. Subtitles This functionality lets your users engage with non-localized material and boost the engagement of your films in apps created by your in-hand OTT developers and are streamed globally. 9. Ratings and Reviews Allow your viewers to evaluate and rate videos, movies, or shows that they just saw to collect their opinions or thoughts and share them with other users via rapid clicks. Popularize your content in social forums & similarly have user personalized feedback. 10. Admin-Panel Manage your app's functionality and growth in real-time with an all-in-one live dashboard to see exact view counts, subscribers, and other metrics and improve the user experience with new features. How Much Will It Cost to Develop an OTT Application? 1. Platform Genre I am sure the type of platform with which you plan to skyrocket your revenue will be outstanding! Besides, you can have two choices of building a SaaS platform or else go for SaaP venture. This purely depends on your brand objectives and cost factors. 2. Features & Tech Stack Choose the ideal list of features, technology-driven capacities for you to launch an enticing business based on for setting business cornerstone with these top emerging (OTT) services. OTT app development OTT App Support Any Industry 1. Content Owners They are the foundation of building any OTT platform that is used to broadcast a creation. These content creators have a variety of opportunities to promote their work, including VOD, movies, virtual events, seminars, and more, all of which rely on the power of streaming technology. 2. Health & Fitness Many fitness enthusiasts & health activists find this a key source for staying healthy and fit, allowing fitness professionals who stream their valuable workouts through OTT services that provide expert advice and supervised programs. 3. Enterprise Owners Every organization has now become touch-friendly. Also, pairing to streaming technology has made visual presentation more effective, resulting in a significant increase in the revenue ladder. Entrepreneurs have a tremendous influence over their target market with the strategic exhibition of ideas that give practical answers. 4. Schools and Universities The advancement of technology has provided great opportunities for connecting and catching up on learning! Curriculum tutors and university chairpersons can now use the e-learning mobile OTT platform to hold live sessions, webcasts, and other events using the power of smart applications. 5. Sports Clubs Now, sports personalities or athletes may easily broadcast their must-see events or tournaments via mobile connectivity, courtesy of launching their own sports-based OTT tv apps, allowing every sports lover to enjoy the classic replays or best shots via video on demand. 6. Personal Trainers Create a bespoke OTT app with leading streaming solution providers and tailor your training platform with live streams, one-to-one personalized video conference sessions, physical fitness courses, and more. 7. Charitable organizations As charitable or NGO activists, you can reach the poor much more quickly than you might think, just as celebrities using real-time streams, motivational on-demand videos, and vocational streaming courses to raise funds. Top OTT App Monetization Strategies With different video monetization possibilities that revolve around learning & apps, a personalized library of increasing income spikes is always worth it. Here are a few examples: how to create OTT platforms 1. SVOD A subscription-based video-on-demand package, also known as SVOD, can be used for a set period of time, such as monthly, quarterly, or annually. Establish a loyal customer base and regular revenue for your streams. 2. AVOD Advertising-based video on demand monetization, which is popularly known as AVOD gives you an ad-supported streaming app. Build an OTT platform with third-party ad integration apps to captivate large audiences and instantly gain increased viewership. 3. TVOD Transactional-based video on demand, often known as pay-per-view, is a great way to generate income for your premium video streaming. Showcase top-rated VOD and one-time watch videos by charging per content and quickly increase revenue. Last but not least: Hey folks, we have now come to the end of this blog, where you have gotten a detailed picture of how to start and how to proceed with an OTT streaming business. Our list of guides can help you outline deciding points for shaping the finest OTT app/platform to construct a worldwide user base. Also, please let us know what you think in the comments section below for more information on how to use the potential of OTT right now!

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Prometheus is an open-source metrics-based monitoring system. It has a multi-dimensional data model and has a strong query language to query that data model. This blog post will discuss monitoring in general and Prometheus from a beginner’s point of view. Monitoring in General Monitoring is a process of collecting, analyzing and displaying useful information about a system. Monitoring should primarily cover: The primary goal of monitoring is to know when the system fails and generate an alert. Alerting: Another goal for monitoring is collecting the information that helps debug a problem or failure. Debugging tools or techniques: The data collected by a monitoring system can be used to generate trends that help the system adapt to the upcoming changes in the system. Generating Trends: Prometheus Architecture Image credit: prometheus.io The above figure depicts the detailed architecture of Prometheus. It contains one centralized monitoring server (Prometheus). All of the other components like the Alertmanager and Grafana provide extensibility to the main monitoring server. We will divide the architecture into four parts to understand it better: are the targets that generate the data. The Data can be exposed to Prometheus through client libraries and exporters. The first part Client libraries can help you create & expose metrics from your application code. Exporters are used when you can’t change the application’s source code. Prometheus uses various exporters to monitor third-party applications like an HTTP server or a database. You could find more details about the exposition format in the document. Exposition Formats The second part is to find the targets and collect the data. Prometheus uses the service discovery mechanism to detect the targets in an environment. It supports integration with EC2, Consul, Kubernetes, and various other platforms to perform service discovery. The process of collecting the metrics is called scraping the targets. The third part consists of storage. By default, Prometheus is configured to store data on a local disk. It can also integrate with various types of remote storage solutions for creating a more resilient solution. The final part comprises alerting and visualization. The alerting rules can be configured in Prometheus, but a separate component called Alertmanager is needed to manage the alerts. For visualization, you can use PromQL to query the metrics and generate graphs in the Prometheus web UI. Along with these graphs, can be generated using tools like Grafana. dashboards There are two ways in which a monitoring solution can collect the metrics — pull-based and push-based. Pull-based is more popular than the latter nowadays, as it doesn’t require any configurational changes in the entities being monitored. The Prometheus server itself uses a pull-based mechanism. A push-based metrics collection can be achieved with a component called . You could find a brief detail about pull-based vs. push-based . Pushgateway here Prometheus Metrics and Data Model Prometheus stores all of its data in time series. Each time series consists of a metric, a unique set of labels, and a value for each timestamp. Metrics are the quantitative measurements of a system property. Labels are the key-value pairs associated with these metrics. Labels enable the filtering and aggregation of metrics through PromQL. Diving deeper, metrics can be classified into four categories. To understand the metrics types better, we will be taking an example of a football match. We will define each metric type and then look at an example for it from our match. Counter When recording a value that is always increasing, a counter-type metric gets used. An example of this is to try and calculate the total number of goals scored in a match. We can use a counter-type metric to store it as this value doesn’t decrease. Gauge For a value that can increment as well as decrement, a gauge metric gets used. For example, possession of a ball in a football match can vary in the range of 0 to 100. It can increase or decrease with time as they play through the game. Histogram A histogram counts the frequency of occurrences of some sample values. It also provides information regarding the total values observed and their sum. For example, we can use a histogram to calculate how many players have completed the passes less than 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, etc. Note that the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 series is pre-defined in a histogram. Summary Summary type is similar to a histogram, as it also counts the frequency over sample values. Additionally, it provides information regarding the total values observed and their sum. Besides this, it adds a label by default to the base metric, i.e., quantile. Quantile tells how many percent values are behind this value. The general quantile which gets assigned to summary ranges from 0 to 1. It is recommended to use a summary when you don’t have a pre-defined list of buckets. A detailed comparison of the Histogram and summary is given . here Common Use-Cases Around Infrastructure Monitoring So far, we have briefly covered Prometheus and metrics. Before concluding this post, let’s have some hands-on experience as well. We will build some use-case around infrastructure monitoring like CPU/memory usage. We will skip the deployment of Prometheus for this post, but you can use a demo instance available . One can also deploy their own demo instance using this . here Git repo We can also query the data stored in Prometheus using PromQL queries. Queries can be executed through the expression browser in the Prometheus web UI. For this part, we will learn the basics while going through these use-cases. CPU Usage The metric which we are going to use is “node_cpu_seconds_total”. This is a counter-type metric, and it is used to calculate the seconds for which the CPU is running in a particular mode. The CPU has various modes like iowait, idle, user, system, etc. As we are calculating usage, we will drop the idle mode. It's why the query looks like this: sum by (cpu)(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode!="idle"}) We used the to merge all CPU modes. sum function It will show the time since the CPU was running, measured in seconds, but we still need to know whether the CPU was busy or was idling recently. To do that, we use the rate function, which calculates the growth rate for a counter. sum by (cpu)(rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode!="idle"}[5m]))*100 The above-mentioned query will generate the growth rate for the past five minutes to determine how much computing power is being used by the CPU. Since all CPU modes add up to 1, we multiplied our query by a hundred to get the result in a percentage. Memory Usage The following query can calculate the total percentage of used memory: node_memory_Active_bytes/node_memory_MemTotal_bytes*100 This is very straightforward and uses the formula of “used divided by total and multiplied by 100”. Free Disk Free disk usage is required to know when you need more space on your infrastructure nodes. Again, we will use the same memory usage approach, but the metric names will get changed. node_filesystem_avail_bytes / node_filesystem_size_bytes *100 Conclusion In this blog post, we discussed Prometheus and metrics. We looked at its architecture and ran some queries to get us started. In the next post of this Prometheus definitive guide series, we will cover PromQL query language in detail. Hope you found this article helpful for getting started with Prometheus. Please ask your queries and share your experience via . Twitter References The official Prometheus documentation. Available at: https://prometheus.io/ Brazil B.(2018) Prometheus: Up & Running. O’Reilly The official Prometheus blog available at: https://prometheus.io/blog/ Robust Perception demo installation. Available at: http://demo.robustperception.io:9090/consoles/index.html Article first seen here.

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Guiding Observers Through Prometheus' Architecture 

I’m a copywriter for startups. The founders I help tell me they take 2 weeks plus JUST writing up a single page. No ad copy. No marketing plan. No customer research. And, most importantly, no dev time. Let’s change that. Recently, I opened up my calendar to startups in various early stages of development. In the end, I spent over 11 hours recording 64 video reviews. I’ve picked up some common landing page mistakes that are super easy to fix. If you’re a tech guy, speak English as a second language, think your copy is ‘meh’, can’t get sign-ups, or don’t know how to explain what you’re doing… Hey 🖐 I’ve got some fast tips for you. 1. Keep your Headline Focused on a Benefit, Not your Product You have 5 seconds to grab someone’s attention before they bounce. You’d be surprised how little people understand in that time (trust me, I’ve tested it). Most of the headlines I reviewed were okay, but they weren’t really clear on what the product did. Nor did they quickly tell me if this site was for someone like me. I focus hero headlines on one of three things: Key benefit or value proposition: eg. The only way to {your unique selling point} Pain based: eg. Stop {wasting time/money/your life} Solution-based: eg. All your {what you do eg. tasks, jobs, noteetc} {verb eg. organized} {time-frame eg. in minutes} : A headline can’t afford to be clever. No one understands what “tomorrow’s predictions, today” really means for them. Avoid being vague. Take your hero headlines back to the end result. If you only take one thing from this entire article, take this 2. Talk About the Outcomes of Using your Product or Service Every single bit of copy needs to build up to the reader’s ideal scenario. Most people are too lazy to truly think and connect the dots. You’re not lazy if you’re launching a startup! So make sure you tell the user what happens once they start using your awesome creation. Check out how this product page nails down the outcomes of using their product. 3. Let the key pain points inform the angle of your benefits I start outlining the top section of all my landing pages with this format: Hero headline - Subtitle to explain/expand on the headline - CTA (usually descriptive) - Agitation section - Main outcome/value proposition. The agitation section is where I get into the real pain. That real driver behind someone being uncomfortable enough to seek out an external solution. This doesn’t always make it into the final page, it’s often cut. But putting it there at the start reminds me to have empathy for what my reader is switching from. Understand the pain, and selling the solution becomes much easier. 4. Avoid Standard H2 Headlines One of the fastest ways to punch up your copy is to go through your H2s and take it back to your reader, the benefits of your product, or the end outcome they want. Turn “How it works” into “Installs on your {site/phone/etc} in 2 minutes” Turn “Key benefits” into “You’re about to get a whole load better at {what your key benefit is}.” This makes your page way more scannable and helps your user understand how it’s going to impact them personally. 5. Speak to One Reader. A Reader with a Story This concept has been covered a fair amount, so most people are halfway there. But a more focused approach could boost conversions even more. One reader often becomes “all developers”. Try to flesh that persona out into a story. Maybe they’re a pro developer who’s skyrocketing in their career, maybe they just started working online, maybe they’re a junior struggling to keep up with new coding languages. Be specific. When people think your tool is “for people like me”, they are far more likely to smash that CTA button. 6. Be Clever with your CTAs Is your product easy enough to understand that someone will click that button at the top of the page? If you think it’s a maybe, then turn your call to action into a call to value. Copyhackers found that buttons that reflected the headline closest to them got clicked the most. Instead of “start a free trial”, try “I want to ________.” <- the blank bit is button copy. You can also play with “show me how to ________.” HOWEVER. Most SaaS companies use ‘Try it free’ or ‘Get started’ as button copy on their homepages. Test what works for you. Check for Repetition, Title Case & Typos Grammarly is my sure-fire way to avoid repetition and typos. You can also try reading copy aloud, reading from the bottom of the page up, or asking for help from a friend. I recommend you use sentence case in almost every scenario. Headlines That Use Title Case Are By Nature, Slower To Read. Give your reader the best experience possible. Format your Website’s Text Like a Book I’ve left this one for last because it’s kinda my favorite. Formatting has nothing to do with writing, but everything to do with readability and subsequently, conversion. In summary, if you’ve made these mistakes, fixing them is going to have a massive impact. Centered Text: Unless you are a designer, do not center all your text. At most, center headlines with a short subtitle below. Centered text is hard to read,  and if someone’s struggling to read, you guessed it, they bounce. Width of Text: I like to keep my copy at a rough 960px width. Anything too wide, and your page can quickly become difficult to read and disjointed. It’s one of the reasons books are printed in portrait, not landscape. Keep it tight, keep readers reading. Hop into your landing page, and make some tweaks If you’ve stayed to the end of the article for that extra bit of sage advice, here it is: A poorly converting page costs you users. Every. Darn. Second. Take action fast. Right now you might be converting 1% of your traffic into a user or a lead. What if you could change that to 5%? With the same amount of traffic, 5x more people will sign up! If you believe in your idea enough to go through the effort of developing it and putting up a landing page, it deserves the best sales copy possible. Also published here

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Interview with Fine Art NFT artist and founder of Blockchain Radio, Pierre Bourque NFT Artist Pierre Bourque is a man of diverse interests. We know Bourque as really one of the more convivial people in blockchain media. He is the founder of Blockchain Radio, a 24x7 internet radio station with blockchain and crypto programming. Blockchain radio is a solid, respectable outlet with a steady stream of audio crypto content. It has been in operation for about 4 years and offers a lineup of 12 shows including “In Conversation With…” hosted by Pierre. The last time we were on Bourque’s show is a memorial to how much I needed to back up from my mic and the fact that I was having terrible seasonal allergies, but Pierre handled that with aplomb as he always does. Bourque is also a proud Bitcoin early adopter, a former board member of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada, and he is on the Advisory Board of the Blockchain Association of Canada. He is also a former NASCAR driver. And an accomplished artist. So, when “The Great NFTing” of March happened, hitting the internet right in the zeitgeist, and making these unexpected (to me) properties suddenly a household name even outside the crypto community, Pierre saw an opportunity to bring his love of art and his work in blockchain together. We took a few minutes to talk with Pierre about creating fine art for distribution as NFTs, his vision, and where he sees the NFT movement going. Pierre Bourque When did you start doing NFTs? “I’ve had people in the crypto space telling me I needed to get my art into NFTs since last Fall. But I procrastinated, partly because I didn’t understand the medium and I was distracted with other activities. But with each passing month I got more and more interested until one afternoon back in March of this year I decided to do my research as to what it was all about. Among other things, I consulted Professor Google and up popped a Bitcoin Magazine article about art and NFTs, and what caught my immediate attention was the primary art used in that article was one of my own crypto art pieces. That was the kick in the butt I needed to get underway.” How does your NFT art relate to your painting? “I see my artistic output as a variety of activities I pursue based on whatever muse motivates me. Sometimes it is oil or acrylic on canvas, though more often recently it has been digital art, whether crypto-related or not. I also do photography.” How are you addressing NFT art on your show? “I see this as a fantastic opportunity to deep dive into the NFT marketplace by interviewing fellow artists, art dealers, and NFT platform operators, among others. NFTs are a coming thing, we’ve barely scratched the surface on what it’s all about and I think the appetite for knowledge about what’s going on in the NFT world is massive.” What are you bringing to the NFT art world? “I have a primary focus on bringing 1/1 NFTs to the world with a focus on fine art and art history in the sense that I respect the road taken by others to bring the art world to where it is today as we collectively endeavor to figure out the possibilities of today and tomorrow. I also recognize that a lot of activity in the current NFT marketplace has been around ‘big drop’ programmatic art projects, so I dropped one of my own, albeit a modest one, partly to understand the medium and partly to offer something unique at a very low price point. That project is my 3D-Glasses NFT. It started as an edition of 10,000 units, but I burned 9,750 of them, leaving just 250 units for sale. Now 60 are placed and the floor price has doubled in just the first 6 weeks.” Are NFTs about adding self-expression to crypto? “100%. I think NFTs are crypto, given their attachment to the blockchain, but they also reflect to artistic elements of the crypto community.” What have you learned about NFTs from interviewing people on your show? “What I’ve learned both from my guests and also firsthand as an NFT artist myself is that the NFT marketplace has driven a tremendous adrenalin rush into the art world. It is incredibly exciting to see the wide variety of artistic expression involved and the bridge being built between both creators and collectors. Absolutely fantastic.” What are you most proud of with your NFTs? “I’m most proud of the community spirit among both collectors and creators that I have been introduced to and I’m had the pleasure to be engaged with since I joined it, 4 months ago. I am grateful for the early support I’ve received and I am very hopeful the NFT collector community will continue to expand to allow for greater commerce with fine art creators.” What do blockchain, fine art, and Nascar racing have in common as pursuits for you? “Pursuit of passion. I have multiple interests but they are tied together by that passion to do it, to make it happen, and to live it!” Bourque’s Dark Art limited series NFT is available on OpenSea. The sale will include a physical, signed version of the artwork for the first owner. The buyer also gets a chance to talk with Pierre about the art. The conversation will be broadcast on Blockchain Radio and provided to the buyer as an MP3. Bourque can be heard every day on his show on which has listeners in over 140 countries and is in early-stage discussions with investors. Blockchain Radio

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Nominated for 2022 - Best Crypto Journalist

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Nft

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Metaverse

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Blockchain

Nominated for 2022 - HackerNoon Contributor of the Year - Cryptocurrency

Conversation with an NFT Artist

So just about two years ago I wrote this: https://hackernoon.com/turning-income-into-collateralized-crypto-loans-hodl-pflrr2bzq Just about a minute ago I wrote this: Now, both alas and alack, I haven’t been doing a good job at heeding my own best advice - hodl. I created a bunch of content awhile ago as tutorials to develop blockchain stuff and my intro was something like ‘missed out on my chance for crypto millionaire a few times over.’ Is not a joke. I found an old address I was auto-selling BTCs for CADs on at QuadrigaCX, the block explorer told me the current value of all deposits something incredibly sad - over $1m USD. This is just one instance of an address I used sometimes for a month or two. Anywho, hindsight is 20/20 and woe is me and such, but I claimed $70k CAD in capital gains last year for ‘selling eth.’ Like, less than a year ago. Ok yes that was just another more recent woe is me. We call this ‘opportunity cost.’ If I just would listen to myself and hodl… So, all of my income one way or another is usually acquired as btcs or eths or some kind of stable. If not, I have American or overseas companies send me wires, ACH, or any sort of nonsense to . Back in like ‘16 I was a significant % of their monthly volume - now I’m just a small fry. https://bitwage.com The real beauty about bitwage is that it really is dollar cost averaging your ctypto entries as you make regular transactions to ditch your fiats for a superior currency, whichever one you might like better. This basically sums it up, except I made a slight booboo - I should have said I now have $18k in BTC, with an average cost of $45k. Anywho, some might say onto me ‘yes Jare but now that I have all my money as crypto what do I do about bills and such?’ In my previous article I’d mentioned compound exclusively. Now, there are many more options - some of them powered by BSC or Polygon. like these guys: https://app.cream.finance/ Grab a bunch of coins at AMM errr, tokens Approve n deposit em (check collat % ratios) Enable collateral Borrow what you need as stables, focus on USDT long as u can cuz they probably going insolvent? That’s actual factual free money You’re now long a bunch of coins Your APY/APR may be negative, but you believe crypto explode anyways rite? You may liquidate inbetween deposits! Fear not, cuz you’re dollarcostaveraging. And you’re super, super long crypto. I assume. Irresponsibly long? Hey if you’re in Canada don’t even cash that sh#t out. use these guys to pay almost any bill payee supported by most banks: https://bylls.com/signup?referralcode=93a96f3d3bc183002c02ca4b2b0b531cca4265691a Now you are set to withdraw stuff. Idk. Binance?

Tether

BUNCH

Creative and/or Dangerous Blockchain Games on $SOL

Jare was the winner of the Noonies 2020 Award for Hacker Noon Contributor of the Year – TRADING.

2021 - Master of Discovery

Following My Own Damn Advice & Dollar Cost Averaging with Bitwage.com

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive August 18th, 2021

Startup Interview with Oona Rokyta, CEO and Co-Founder, Lance

@lancebanking
Lance

How to Leverage Conversion Paths to Boost Conversions

@syedbalkhi
Syed Balkhi

Build an Article Recommendation Engine Using Machine Learning

@thawkin3
Tyler Hawkins

We Looked Into Darknet's Covid-19 Vaccines Scams

@checkpoint
Check Point Software

Tackling Learning Disorders With Technology: Hasan Zafer Elcik, Otsimo's Co-founder & CEO

@otsimo
Otsimo

"Success Comes To Those Who Work Hard" Gaurav Jain, Co-Founder of MageComp

@Scoot
Zoya

“Perfection is the enemy of good.” - Voltaire x GPT-J

@wolff
Josh Wolff

3 Categories of Model Training Considerations

@modzy
Modzy

How Ethereum Virtual Machine Chains Fix Ethereum

@amandawhitcroft
Amanda Whitcroft

Startup Interview with Gabriel Dymowski, DoxyChain Co-founder & CEO

@gabrieldymowski
gabrieldymowski

How to Create a World Class OTT App for Mobile and Smart TV

@sam
Alex Sam

Guiding Observers Through Prometheus' Architecture

@deepankur797
Deepankur Singh Baliyan

How To Fix 8 Common Landing Page Mistakes Made by Early-Stage Startups

@clairehagin
Claire H

Conversation with an NFT Artist

@justin-roberti
Justin Roberti

Following My Own Damn Advice & Dollar Cost Averaging with Bitwage.com

@jare
Jarett Dunn

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive August 18th, 2021

@lancebankingLance

@syedbalkhiSyed Balkhi

@thawkin3Tyler Hawkins

@checkpointCheck Point Software

@otsimoOtsimo

@ScootZoya

@wolffJosh Wolff

@modzyModzy

@amandawhitcroftAmanda Whitcroft

@gabrieldymowskigabrieldymowski

@samAlex Sam

@deepankur797Deepankur Singh Baliyan

@clairehaginClaire H

@justin-robertiJustin Roberti

@jareJarett Dunn